Friday, December 18, 2009

In my continuing effort to ignore the ongoing demise of the human race (shorter news: you and your posterity are soooooo screwed), here's a very cool satellite image of alluvial fans:(Click for macrification) Below is a similar example, here on earth. Yeah, the one above is on Mars. If you look carefully, you can find quite a number of impact craters on the image- for example, there are four near the top middle.(The above is also macrifiable if you know the trick.) Anyone recognize the location of the earthly image? Bajadas (Spanish 'j,' pronounced "buh-hah'-duh") are a series of alluvial fans coalescing to form a broad wedge or ramp, so in both images, it's not inaccurate to call the landforms alluvial fans, but it would probably be more accurate to describe them as bajadas.

Is north up? I can't actually think of a place in SoCal that has apparent rivers running across basins like that, could think that the mts on the left were either the Sierra or the White Mts, could think of the hills on the right being those hills near Lone Pine where many westerns have been shot, but no highway.

Silver- I guess I missed this comment a week ago... you've basically nailed it: the mountains on the left are the Sierras, the hills on the right are The Alabama Hills, and the bajada between is called Movie Flats for the reason you mention. I zoomed this to avoid including 395, which is off the right of the edge. The "rivers" are plants and trees around the edges of streams coming off The Sierras, and so appear to be wider than the actual streams themselves are. In the middle near the left edge, you can see a prominent switchback on Whitney Portal Road.